This week marked the formal launch of DXC Technology, a $25 billion IT services provider brought forth by combining CSC with the IT services arm of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. While there’s no shortage of options when it comes to IT services providers, DXC Technology CTO Dan Hushon says there’s no doubt that DXC Technology is arriving on the scene at one of the most auspicious times in IT history.
Hushon says organizations that have embraced digital transformation are quickly discovering the bi-modal approaches to managing their IT environments are not going to stand the test of time. Many of those organizations are starting to realize that a bi-modal approach to IT that artificially separates legacy systems and new application development projects winds up creating a massive amount of technical debt because the new projects duplicate many IT functions that already exist inside the organization.
Rather than reinventing those IT wheels, Hushon says the focus on digital business transformation is quickly shifting toward extending legacy systems in a way that makes them flexible enough to support digital business processes. In some cases, that means developing a robust set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are easily accessible. In other cases, it means encapsulating an entire legacy application in a container such as Docker that not only sports a standard API, it makes that application portable between different classes of IT platforms. After that initial step, an IT organization can then employ a microservices architecture to decompose monolithic legacy applications into a more manageable set of services. Whatever the path forward, Hushon notes that organizations have invested over three trillion dollars in custom applications alone.
Couple the need to modernize those applications with the rise of complex machine and deep learning algorithms and the general shift toward treating IT as an operating rather than capital expense, and Hushon says it’s becoming obvious that organizations are going to increasingly rely on external IT services expertise to achieve their digital business goals. Reliance on external IT services is no longer simply a game of labor arbitrage. Organizations are relying on external IT services providers to fill a critical gap in skills that is required to inject much higher levels of IT agility within the construct of a digital business, says Hushon.
Obviously, DXC Technology is not the only IT services provider eyeing similar opportunities. But as IT continues to evolve in the age of digital business, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the relationship between internal IT teams and external IT services providers is rapidly evolving as well.
